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The crux of the Abrego Garcia controversy is a dispute about who "morally" counts as an American citizen.
The rallying cry of the pro-Abrego Garcia camp is: "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us." In other words, they see no meaningful difference between him and a legal US citizen, and so there is no Schelling Fence that can be drawn between the two. On other hand, the pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories.
The slippery slope argument (e.g. Laurence Tribe yesterday, and Justice Sotomayor's concurrence) is that if the government gets its way with Abrego Garcia, there will be no legal obstacle preventing them from treating citizens in the same way.
But the thing is, this is already the case. The US government's treatment of citizens abroad is already effectively unconstrained by the law. The government can negotiate for the release of a citizen imprisoned by another country, but nobody would argue that the government is legally obligated to do this, and it's absurd to imagine a court compelling them to do so, because that effectively makes diplomacy impossible. (The US government must be able to value the citizen's return at less than infinity, or else they lose all negotiating leverage.) On the other hand, the government can drone-strike a citizen abroad without due process, and while that may stir up political pushback here at home, there are effectively no legal repercussions.
This is because, according to the constitutional separation of powers, foreign affairs are a quintessentially "non-justiciable political question". In common parlance this means: If you don't like what the government is doing, the proper way to fix it is through advocacy and the democratic process, not through the court system.
To which the pro-Abrego Garcia camp will gesture around at the crowd of protesters they've assembled, waving "Free Abrego Garcia!" signs, and say "Great, come join us. Here's your sign!"
But of course the pro-Trump immigration hawks see no need to take it up, because even if these protests have no effect, this does not in any way diminish their confidence that if a citizen were to be treated in the same way, then the backlash would be swift, universal, and sufficient to compel the citizen's return - no court order needed. For them, it is simply obvious that the failure of the Abrego Garcia advocacy has no implications whatsoever for the success of the hypothetical advocacy on behalf of a fellow citizen, and this is no cause for cognitive dissonance because citizens and illegal-immigrant non-citizens are two entirely separate categories.
Prior to anything else in the political life of a nation, there must be near-universal agreement on who constitutes the body politic for whose benefit the government exists and to whom they are accountable. If there is factional dispute over this basic question, then morally speaking there is no nation, but multiple distinct nations that happen to find themselves all mixed up in the same land. But I'm sure this is no great surprise.
While there are other levels of disagreement, you're missing the one where Trump supporters might be confident that although some citizens may indeed be affected, it wouldn't be people like them but naturalized immigrants, children thereof, or at worst, shit-stirring far-left activists. In this, I fear they'd be correct, though it's an ugly thought.
What’s ugly about it? I straightforwardly don’t think there’s any plausible scenario in which I’d ever be considered for deportation, under the governance of whichever party you can imagine taking power in the United States. The same is true for basically everybody in this world whom I care significantly about. I think you and I both agree that it’s both unrealistic and unfairly-onerous to ask a person’s circle of concern to extend infinitely. Can you explain to me why I am obligated to extend it to everyone who has any claim to any level of authorization to live within U.S. jurisdiction?
What's ugly about it is that Americans who are not sufficiently white don't like the idea that their white coworker or whoever is basically fine with them being seized and deported to El Salvador just because they're a bit too far on his circles of concern.
I can’t speak for Americans but an awful lot of people who are sufficiently white are very fed up with having foreigners and the children of foreigners dumped on them and being told, “these are your people now and so you must care about them”. No, they’re not and they never were. I know damn well who my people are.
Not to mention that the foreigners in question know perfectly well who their ingroup is and have spent the last ten years making it very clear that the ingroup excludes me. If we were having this conversation 15 years ago it might be quite different. But it’s way too late for that now.
All that's being asked is that you not send innocent people to prison in third world countries. I don't think it's reasonable to reject that. In some cases, foreigners are being invited to come to the US, and then being deported to El Salvador, a country they are not even citizens of. No one is asking for you to give up anything of value. You are being asked to not be inhumane.
Except that isn’t what happened here. The guy is an illegal immigrant from ES.
There have been cases of Venezuelans legally in the US being deported to El Salvador where hey we're imprisoned, with the US paying for it.
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Granted, and given ideal circumstances I agree with all of that.
What can’t and doesn’t work is having hundreds of thousands of people arrive every year and then having to follow an expensive multi-month process for every single migrant to get rid of them.
In short, how do you propose to square truly mass migration with giving each migrant due process, given real-world legal and financial constraints?
The government can hire more immigration judges. There are extremely few of them.
But you're missing the point. You can deport people without paying to have them imprisoned.
~700, which is roughly the same number as US district judges.
Taking the number of illegal immigrants as 8 million (no clue if this is accurate, but I've seen it tossed around a lot recently so just using it for ballpark math), assuming a one-hour hearing for each (longer than I think they usually get but let's be generous with "due process"), standard 8 hour work days, to process them in a single year would take 3000-3500 additional immigration judges, making them the largest group of federal judges by a huge margin if I'm reading the other numbers right.
Annual salary averages somewhere north of 150K, but using that for this lazy math would put this Immigration Judge Year at $450M in salaries. Not a crazy amount looking at DOJ's budget and other program expenses.
Obviously lots of other expenses, hiring them for a single year is a bit absurd, etc etc. Just thought it would be interesting to put some numbers to what a useful increase would look like.
If some country will take them for free. We don't have extra Australias laying around anymore.
Paying other countries to take them without strict imprisonment is also an option that seems to work somewhat for, ha, Australia.
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Well, for example, you could minimize damage by not sending deportees to foreign prisons. Just fly them out and let them off at the airport and don't let them back in again. Whether the country to which they've been returned wants them locked up is its problem and they'll have to arrest them by their own means and prove a case against them within the local justice system to do that.
Well - do we know, actually, that this isn't what happened here? I think it's pretty likely they did in fact fly to an airport and not directly to a prison, and that it's pretty likely they did in fact turn them over to El Salvadoran custody at that point. Or are you making the stronger demand that we not deport anyone who is likely to be imprisoned in their home country? Unfortunately this amounts to a demand that we provide sanctuary and extra privileges to the world's criminals, which is outrageous.
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Sure, I’m fine with that. I suspect the prison is an El Salvador requirement - one problem with deporting people (especially criminals) is that lots of countries don’t actually want these guys back. This gives El Salvador an excuse to demand payment and guarantees that the returnees won’t be a nuisance.
Unfortunately it doesn’t deal with the main problem though.
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Tough luck. The mood in the maga crowd (at least from my peers) is fuckem all. Some are even wondering how they are going to push the overton window enough to start denaturalizing citizens.
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That's the motte, where the bailey is that any individual instance of deportation is inhumane for one reason or another and the burden of proof is on the society that would like to deport the immigrants and that this proof is so onerously difficult to provide that deportations become so much more difficult relative to illegal immigrations that a positive net inflow of illegal immigrants is absolutely guaranteed.
You're the one employing the motte and bailey technique by literally changing what the argument is about when challenged. No one here is saying all deportation is inhumane. This is a distraction from the fact that the US government is sending people to foreign prisons without charge.
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